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Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is friendly and engaging. He tells a good story and on many issues he expresses compelling broad sentiments. It’s the details that he struggles with.

His election platform and statements are full of contradictions, and when pressed for specifics at a meeting with the Star’s editorial board on Thursday he resorted to well-rehearsed talking points. Ultimately, he leaves the impression that there may be less here than meets the eye. He’ll have to turn that around – and quickly – if he hopes to persuade voters by Oct. 6 that he should be Ontario’s next premier.

Right now, Hudak is trying too hard to be all things to all people. He’s promising to spend more money on what Ontarians care about most – health care and education – while at the same time promising to reduce energy bills and lower taxes. The price tag for these benefits comes, in part, from unspecified cuts in “non-priority areas.”

With few details of where he will find at least $2.3 billion of savings, Hudak’s vow to cut “wasteful spending” feels a lot like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s famous and thoroughly discredited complaints about a “gravy train” at city hall. Torontonians who were promised no service cuts and yet now face both the loss of many city services they value and a property tax increase, are unlikely to be so trusting again. And this vivid lesson that one man’s waste is another’s core service can’t have been lost on other Ontarians, either.

The Progressive Conservatives have less than three weeks to move off their generalities and offer specifics to give voters an idea of what they could really expect with a Hudak administration.

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At the moment, Hudak’s numerous policy contradictions give voters further cause to be leery. He has promised that he’ll give municipalities more “respect” but he is prepared to saddle them with the continued burden of paying for $500 million of provincial welfare and court costs. (Both the Liberals and NDP have committed to removing these unfair costs from property taxpayers.)

Hudak says he will rebuild the middle class and bring good jobs to Ontario, the kind “you can buy a house with.” But he will cut jobs in the green manufacturing sector and make it harder for unions, who traditionally fight for those good jobs, to operate. He wants Ontario to be the number one destination for new immigrants but opposes Liberal plans to help foreign students, foreign companies and “foreign workers”—more accurately known as newly minted Canadian citizens.

With a $15-billion provincial deficit, voters already know that whoever forms the next government will have difficult choices to make. That is why they deserve to know as much as possible about where each leader plans to find savings. Hudak has been far too fuzzy on this score.

We need to “get government focused,” he says. “We can’t continue to try to be all things to all people and throw money at every problem that’s out there.” Fair enough. But what will you cut?

And if Hudak doesn’t plan to be “all things to all people” in government, why is he trying to do it during the campaign? To appeal to the middle, Hudak has picked the same priorities as Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty – health care and education. To appeal to his conservative base, among other things, he proposes to make more people ineligible for welfare, force prisoners to work on chain-gangs and make ex-offenders wear electronic trackers.

It won’t be easy to get the province back on the right track to prosperity, says Hudak, adding, “I’ve outlined how I’ll do it.”

Really, though, he hasn’t. His platform is vague and his numbers don’t seem to add up. He is fast running out of time to fix that.

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